Curtain Up (39 page)

to the end her listeners stay rapt . . . The main interest of the play, as a piece of writing, is in the mystery; but Mrs Christie writes quick, speakable dialogue and, gleefully, her cast keeps us guessing until the dying minutes of the third act . . . And, for once, Mrs Christie does not ask us to solve the mystery of a detective, to fathom why so strange a fellow should be down from Scotland Yard. Martin Wyldeck's detective is an Englishman. He is a professional. He has no catchwords, no foibles, no oddities of dress or manner. He merely does his job. It is all very curious and unexpected.
⁴²

Ivor Brown, in the
Observer
, also approved of Christie's specially created new stage detective: ‘Martin Wyldeck is an admirable Detective Inspector, neither smart nor smart Alec, but just
humanly and taciturnly natural.'
⁴³
It seems that Christie had finally expunged the curse of Poirot from her stage work.

Other preconceptions about her plays were less easily dispensed with than the inclusion of Poirot, however. The
News of the World
wrote:

Agatha Christie, sitting well back in a box at the Fortune theatre, listened to the rounds of applause and knew that the old, old formula had worked once more. For her new play,
The Hollow
, faithfully follows the pattern of her countless other ‘whodunit' stories which have made the 60-year-old authoress Britain's most popular thrill provider. Of course, there may be some who will cavil at this; who will demand new angles on the proven formula. But as one who rarely guesses right in the game of ‘find the murderer' I personally hope that the Christie technique will continue unchanged. There is of course, a country house week-end party. There is, inevitably, a shooting on the stage by a murderer or murderess unseen. And it follows automatically that the man who is shot is loved by various women (three in this case) all of whom may have a motive for murder. Jeanne de Casalis has a perfect ‘Mrs Feather' part, and supplies the laughs that according to custom must lighten the tension. It's ideal entertainment for those who can't sleep without a thriller at the bedside.
⁴⁴

This was, in fact, only Christie's fifth play to be presented in the West End, and of the previous four only two had been set in a country house, and neither of those had featured the shooting of a philandering man by an unseen murderer.

The
Sunday Chronicle
introduced an even more cynical note:

It is reasonably safe to prophesy that eventually almost everyone in this enchanted island will see
The Hollow
, Agatha Christie's latest whodunit, which opened at the Fortune Theatre on Thursday. Only a small proportion can see it at the Fortune, even if it runs there for years, for this is one
of London's smallest theatres – with 493 seats. But this we are sure is only the launching site for a long and lucrative voyage.
The Hollow
will be filmed, televised, broadcast and for the next decade or so will head the ‘surefire' list compiled for repertory companies and amateur societies. Considered purely as a play it would be a negligible contribution to the drama, but as a whodunit (and they have been woefully scarce in recent years) it is a fascinating and intriguing exhibition of sleight-of-hand on the part of the author.
⁴⁵

Although most of the reviews insisted on describing the play as a ‘thriller' or a ‘whodunit', Saunders remained true to his promise to Christie and removed the words from the publicist's vocabulary. Whether the alternative was an improvement is, perhaps, doubtful: ‘This gripping but not gruesome comedy-mystery is the latest play from the most famous of all detective story writers', proclaimed the leaflet advertising the production, continuing, ‘Jeanne de Casalis, George Thorpe and Ernest Clark co-star in this brilliant play. Glamour is provided by Beryl Baxter, star of the film “Idol of Paris” and Dianne Foster, lovely actress of the Canadian stage.'
⁴⁶

Although Hubert Gregg evidently made a good job of directing
The Hollow
, and made a good living from his association with Christie over the years, it seems a shame that someone with so little regard for her both as a writer and a person should have been so close to the centre of operations. In his book, Gregg is at great pains to emphasise what he believes to be the critical importance of his own contributions to the script, acknowledged, as he sees it, by Saunders' reference to him (on a copy of it he signed in 1952) as ‘the architect of victory'.
⁴⁷
‘One day, I was given the script of
The Hollow
to read,' he explains. ‘It was hair-raising . . . I mean I thought it was abysmal. The dialogue was unspeakable . . . the characters were caricatures. The denouement was good. “Jesus,” I said to myself quietly. “I need the job.”'
⁴⁸
Similarly, when offered the role of John Cristow, ‘Any actor who would accept Cristow if he didn't need the money would be out of his histrionic
mind.' A few months previously Christie had been awarded a Fellowship by the Royal Society of Literature. Her critic's greatest claim to fame as a writer were the lyrics to ‘Maybe it's Because I'm a Londoner'.

Gregg makes great play of the fact that Christie does not allow enough time for a kettle to boil or for actors to change into evening dress, and that her set requires two French windows, a door, a fireplace and a ‘breakfast nook' (all of which were, as it turned out, well within the capabilities of designer Joan Jefferson Farjeon). He claims to have cut the first act ‘to ribbons', and that he had to persuade Christie to introduce a thunderstorm at the climax of the piece. In these days before lighting designers, when directors tended to light their own plays, we hear much from him of his particular skills in this department (there is a lighting plan inserted in the front of his copy of the script). No wonder it rankled when Christie not only failed to mention him in her autobiography, but heaped particular praise on Irene Hentschel's lighting for
Ten Little Niggers
. Perhaps most astonishingly, Gregg compares his dramaturgical role in nurturing
The Hollow
from page to stage with that of Gerald du Maurier's legendary (and well paid) contribution to Edgar Wallace's dramatisation of
The Ringer
, and argues that he should have received comparable acknowledgement and financial recompense for his work. He includes in his book a page of Christie's own notes as if to demonstrate the vast superiority of his own insights.

The Christie archive includes no script of any sort for
The Hollow
, but Gregg's own copy is amongst the Gregg/Christie memorabilia recently put up for sale. It has to be said that the typescript appears to have been extensively cut and annotated in (blue) ink, but whether this constitutes anything more significant than the usual adjustments made to a new play at rehearsals with the writer present is difficult to say. If the script had been definitively reworked prior to rehearsals, as Gregg suggests, then it would surely have been retyped and issued to the actors on day one. It is also worth questioning
whether Gregg's textual cuts improved the quality of the work. Here are three separate examples of the cuts he made:

       
DORIS: My dad says I ought to call myself a domestic help.

       
GUDGEON: That's about all you are.

       
[
Cut
: DORIS: What d'you mean?

Cut:
GUDGEON: In my young days when a girl wasn't bright enough to be a good parlour maid or a proper housemaid, or even an efficient kitchen maid, she had to call herself a ‘household help' and was paid accordingly. She had no proper status.]

CRISTOW [on his role as a doctor]: I don't cure them. Just hand out faith, hope and probably a laxative. [
Cut
: In a bottle flavoured with peppermint for the poor and wrapped in cellophane and costing a guinea for the rich.]

       
[
Cut:
HENRIETTA: And of course Gudgeon is the last of the butlers. Any bit of human flotsam who is entrapped in this house as an under-servant has to live up to Gudgeon's standards or go.]
⁴⁹

Gregg holds the following line up for particular ridicule as an example of Christie's ‘unspeakable' dialogue:

       
HENRIETTA: Hurry up, Henry, it's nearly dinner time.

       
HENRY: I'll be like greased lightning.
⁵⁰

Personally, I can't see a problem with it; and can well imagine such a response from old Sir Henry. Some of Gregg's work on scene structure clearly resolves issues of timing, which is, after all, the director's job. I cannot really see, though, any marked improvements as a result of his editing of Christie's generally well-crafted dialogue. Gregg was horrified when, a few years later, he was turned down for another job because of his work on what someone had described to his potential employer as ‘those awful Christie plays'. He apparently saw no irony in the
fact that his own lack of regard for her writing doubtless had a role to play in propagating the views that condemned Christie to the end of the Arts Council's pier.

Christie was never resistant to the dramaturgical input of others, and was always a willing participant in the sometimes tortuous process of script editing and development. But we can be sure that, with the possible exception of sections of
Akhnaton
where she draws on a range of source material, the writing itself is always her own. She was strongly resistant to the work of third parties being included in her scripts, and generally insistent that she alone should be responsible for carrying out any changes that were required. She had at one point told Basil Dean that he could make any further changes that he wanted to
A Daughter's a Daughter
(which he didn't); but after Dean's successful co-adaptation with its author of Margaret Kennedy's
The Constant Nymph
, it may well have been that Christie felt this was a good way to maintain his interest. And she was to allow some expert interpolations regarding legal procedures in
Witness for the Prosecution
. But Christie's own stage dialogue is instantly recognisable as such, and
The Hollow
is rich with it; and although the absence of early drafts limits our ability to understand just how this particular script developed, I do not detect any significant sections of writing in it that are not Christie's own.

Whatever the truth of Gregg's input into the script, the production of
The Hollow
was a great success, and at the end of August
The Stage
ran an interview with its star:

Jeanne de Casalis, familiar to audiences in modern drama and comedy parts, has established herself firmly in another sort of play by her performance in Agatha Christie's thriller
The Hollow
at the Fortune. Altogether, this play, in the first few weeks of what looks like being a long run, has been the cause of several remarkable happenings. Firstly, it is the first thriller to capture a London audience for several years. Secondly, it opened in high-summer when hopes for success are never very optimistic. Thirdly, it has brought back into
the crowded life of the West End the little Fortune. It has had the patronage of Queen Mary; it is attracting full houses; curtain speeches are in demand; and the faith of Peter Saunders, who presents it, has been justified. ‘Although
The Hollow
is such an expertly written play' Miss de Casalis said, ‘part of its success rests on Hubert Gregg's excellent production and the good acting of the entire company, as a team . . . Acting in a thriller demands special effort in several ways. Although the author, as in this case, makes the characters as natural as possible, inevitably they are subject to plot-development. There is always a sense of unreality mixed in with the “natural”. The player has to convince the audience it is seeing real, everyday people, and yet bring out the highly charged, artificial atmosphere of a thriller. This must be done without disturbing the balance or conviction on either level. So you see it is not an easy job! But I find the work particularly exciting. In my case there is another problem which I have to resolve afresh every night. The public have come to regard me in the last few years as a comedienne. As soon as I come on to the stage at the Fortune they expect to laugh, want to laugh, or do laugh. Well there is plenty of comedy in my role of Lady Angkatell, but I have to be very careful not to let this overflow into serious dramatic moments. This makes acting the part very tricky, yet it is the sort of thing almost any player revels in. It demands your best work all the time . . . I think it is quite true to say that there is always a place in the theatre for a good thriller, but it must have some sense of ordinary reality blended with its excitement and suspense, and it must be well presented.'
⁵¹

The deal at the Fortune had been for a four-month limited season over the summer. Although, as Saunders points out, this is usually regarded as the worst time of the year in the West End theatre, there is some indication that the theatre's unenviable Covent Garden side-street location was on this occasion beneficial, placing it on the route taken by many to and from Festival of Britain events on the South Bank. As noted
in
The Stage
, amongst the play's many customers was avid theatregoer and Agatha Christie fan Queen Mary, the king's 84-year-old mother. By the time the engagement at the Fortune came to an end in October, the production had gained sufficient momentum to secure a transfer to the independently owned Ambassadors Theatre, where it eventually completed its run the following May, totalling 376 performances. According to Saunders, the Ambassadors' manager, Herbert Malden, didn't like the play and had turned it down when a London home was originally being sought for it. Now his view was, ‘It doesn't matter what I think. What I do like is the business you're doing.'

The Stage
, reviewing the play in its new home, noted that ‘The production by Hubert Gregg of this engrossing murder play drew a full house on its opening night at the Ambassadors, and as the tension does not snap until a second before the final curtain, it should continue to have a strong appeal. Jeanne de Casalis, Joan Newell, Jessica Spencer, Beryl Baxter, George Thorpe, Ernest Clark [who had replaced Gregg as Cristow] and Colin Douglas repeat their ingenious performances, their unselfish team-work serving the author to the best possible advantage.' Christie's failure to write star turns had seemingly paid off.